So I thought I’d write a bit about the trip: Turkey…mostly share random thoughts, random images in a thinly veiled attempt to both recreate the images in my mind as well as frantically tether some of the more fleeting memories to my memory. This particular piece of writing may not hold any kind of interest, humor or need for anyone other than myself (or possibly John) but feel free to forge on… Here’s the flight from Boston to New York JFK: I am on a commuter flight, after having checked my luggage (in what would turn out to be a most fateful move), crammed into seat 19, the aisle. Of course as soon as I am settled, the rest of the back of the plane clambers on, comprising of, you guessed it, a college group bound for Prague for the semester. They are full on Ugg-wearing, glossy haired, babbling…I feel almost bad despising them already but when “Darce” sits next to me and plops open US weekly on her lap, poking the girl in front of her to “read the same issue so we can compare” and know I’m in for a long hour flight. Here’s the JFK wait: I eat a salad at the packed Chili’s Too, have a beer, shrug bewildered when the rather intoxicated southern girl next to me asks me when the Rose Bowl is (I wondered if perhaps I should know this little tidbit) and make my way to my gate. The flight to Paris is continuing on to Dubai and I can see that most of the passengers are headed to India. I sit on the floor, watching as a man in a red flannel shirt and camo-hat berates the woman behind the counter in an almost unbearably loud voice regarding the impossibility of changing his seat. The flight begins to board and many of the people wander aimlessly, they do not understand the instructions…they do not understand English and there is no one to help them. I call a few people. I drink the last swig of my coffee. I board. Anja (sp?) is sitting next to me and I’m on the aisle. We pull out our books, get ourselves settled and wait. Wait. Wait. It appears that since many of the passengers do not know English, they did not have the necessary documents ready…passports, tickets, etc. Anja and I sit, wait and begin the shifting game. The flight is now about 1/2 hour delayed and as we head out onto the runway and get in line behind what seems like a veritable traffic jam of aircraft, I sit and suffer with the knowledge that I definitely should not have combined a large Sam Adams with a grande gingerbread latte. I’m most certainly going to die of a ruptured bladder before we even crawl up into the sky. Oh, and there’s a woman with a newborn sitting right across the aisle from me. My seatmate agrees with me, seems she tanked up on caffeine as well. We sit, we stare, we shift… finally there is anarchy in row 23 and we make a break for it, acting point for each other as we race for the facilities. The flight progresses…we are served a gnarly dinner, 80% of which was inedible for me… I drink a Heineken to put myself to sleep and it does its job… I snooze for a blissful 35 minutes. The baby starts to cry. The in-flight movie (would you believe it was Sky-High????) begins…I begin to look around and make up pretend lives for everyone seated around me. I begin with the man seated one row up to my left. He is rail thin, fidgety, pale and uber-nervous. He unfolds the Sunday NYT (note, it is now Friday) and throughout the course of the flight he read it word for word from the front page to the last. I physically willed him to drop the book review into the aisle, used all of my Sylvia Browne telepathy but to no avail. I decide that he is an androgynous cyborg sent from the NRA to ensure that one of the most antsy, annoying people on earth sits right near me for the whole eight hour slight. Oh, and I forgot to mention that he keeps a silver flask in the seat cushion in front of him from which he swigs about every twenty minutes? The night progresses horrifically slowly with me sleeping about a total of another 27 minutes… the one time I fell into an almost deep sleep my head tilted into the aisle and as clichés must go, I was walloped by the protruding thigh of a passing flight attendant. Eerily enough, as soon as I saw the shards of light blasting through the clouds signaling that it was nearing 6am, Paris time and we were closing in on Charles DeGaulle, I sat up and immediately felt as though it were indeed 6am, as opposed to my watch which clearly screamed 1am.I think I am immune to time changes…Pat and I discovered this in London. I am not, however, immune to exhaustion, as I would come to find out. People rustle, people bustle and I get a quick flash of fear as the intricate instructions on the various flight connections and terminal information are transmitted on the TV screens…Anja, who is going to Berlin, and I struggle to make out the nearly miniscule map on the screen, attempting to decipher just where the hell we are going to have to haul ass to as the pilot has already said that we are 35 minutes late. We prep, us row 23, the anarchists of the flight. we got up early, we checked for shifting, we got our shit down. I scoffed in the face of the seatbelt.. (really, I have always thought them to be asinine, and this coming from one who is militant regarding them on the ground.. but 30,000 feet up in the air? That piece of fabric and scratched buckle is not going to save me from hurtling to the earth… the seatback/floating cushion is somewhat comforting but even that…the only thing I actually like is the thought that someday I may get to slide down one of the inflatable stairs but I would, of course, prefer that to be whilst the flight is on the ground, perhaps when a seagull is mashed into the exhaust)…we are ready to bolt. She has t get through customs; I have to get from terminal 2E to terminal 2C. We are screwed.